


invocations

by oops_ohdear



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Magic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-23 05:58:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10713600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oops_ohdear/pseuds/oops_ohdear
Summary: Nicklas Backstrom does not buy any Cap'n Crunch, does not fight any Toronto Maple Leafs, and does not banish any demons from our mortal realm.





	invocations

**Author's Note:**

> set immediately after friday night's game + injury scare. written mostly for stress relief, and therefore quick and self-indulgent.
> 
> this whole thing is based on chatfic with kate, and if you like a line there's roughly an 83% chance i stole it directly from her and just added capital letters. 
> 
> the chatfic, in turn, was based on this: http://thornescratch.tumblr.com/post/152843992358

Nicklas doesn’t stick around for long after the game. He listens with one ear while Alex tells the media scrum all about how fine his knee is, but he’s halfway out the door before Alex even has a shirt on.

It’s not that he’s angry. Not with Alex, anyway. He’s not even angry with Kadri, not anymore. In fact, he swallowed his anger, huge great gulps of it, when the second period started and Alex was on the ice with the rest of them. He’s not angry anymore, but he feels the worse for it.

He sits in the driver’s seat of his car, glad he and Alex didn’t drive in together, and gets out his phone.

 _Going to the grocery store_ , he sends, and then drives.

  


They could hire someone to buy their groceries, much like they could hire somebody to walk Alex’s pack of dogs, but if they did neither of them would have an excuse to get out of the house when they needed it. The fact is that they spend most of their waking hours together, at the rink or otherwise and it’s good, it’s better than good, but sometimes, it’s too much. So Nicky buys groceries, and Alex walks the dogs, and nobody commits homicide. It’s a good arrangement.

Now, Nicky stands in the cereal aisle, contemplating various sugar-high cartoon mascots. 

His phone buzzes.

 _wards tonight?_ , Alex has sent, complete with a picture of his stocking feet propped up on the coffee table next to a haphazard stack of grimmoires. 

Nicklas considers it. During the regular season he and Alex renew the wards on Kettler and Verizon Center once a month, if that, and don’t ward the team busses or planes at all, without a particular reason. But it’s the playoffs, and playoffs are a particular reason all their own.

Still. He’s tired. Alex is tired, too, and in pain, whether he’ll say so to the _Post_ or not. They’re in no condition to be doing spellwork.

 _No_ , he sends back. _Put those away?_

When Nicklas first joined the Capitals for a full season the team’s nutritionist took him on a guided tour of the grocery store, complete with cooking tips and a certain amount of earnest, wide-eyed, diet-based condescension. The part of his brain which filed those details away in the folder marked, _holy shit it’s the NHL, let’s not fuck this up_ , is insisting very loudly that he leave the cereal aisle immediately.

Another part of his brain is muttering, a little ashamed of itself: _but Alex loves crunchberries_.

“Crunchberries,” Nicklas mutters, alone in the cereal aisle, “are not a real fruit.”

He puts the stupid box in the cart, anyway.

His phone buzzes again.

 _don’t worry,_ Alex has responded, _definitely won’t summon demon ))))))))_

 _Haha_ , Nicklas types back, and trusts Alex to understand the bone-dry tone in which it ought to be read.

Alex knows too much to be making jokes about the occult; he’s got a doctorate, for God’s sake. He knows the old accounts of ruined lives and ripped-up souls; he’s heard every cautionary tale in the book. He read half the gory details out loud, to Nicklas, while he worked on his thesis. Summoning a demon is the kind of last resort nonsense reserved for the stupid, the power-mad, and the martyrs.

Alex knows too much to be making jokes about the occult, and for that matter, he’s too old for them. Not that it stops him. Clearly. He’s too old, and he’s tired, and in pain, and he won’t talk about it but he could have been out of the playoffs tonight, just like that, another year of effort and another long summer.

Nicky stares blankly at the shelves in front of him. Cap’n Crunch stares back.

Alex wouldn’t, he tells himself. He absolutely wouldn’t. It was a joke, and it was in poor taste, and that’s all that it was.

Alex absolutely wouldn’t, but Nicky leaves the grocery store empty-handed, anyway.

  


He drives exactly five miles per hour over the speed limit all the way home. He locks the car twice because he can’t remember if he did it the first time, and then lets himself into the house. The door closing again behind him is too loud. His feet are too loud on the entryway tile. His breath is too loud in his chest. He doesn’t have anything to do with his hands—no grocery bags—and he feels rattled, and obvious, and annoyed. He jams the car keys back into his coat pocket, and goes into the living room.

Alex is sitting on the couch, in sweatpants and a t-shirt, the picture of lazy innocence. Someone’s shouting on the TV, but the volume is turned down low. 

“Hi Nicky,” he says. It takes a moment before he looks up from his phone, but when he does he’s smiling.

He doesn’t _look_ demonic. No more so than usual, anyway.

There is a pause.

“No groceries?” Alex asks. His smile twists into a more uncertain shape.

“No,” Nicklas says.

Alex’s feet are still propped up on the coffee table, crossed at the ankle. This disrespect for furniture was a habit he picked up when he first moved into his own space, because he liked that there was no one there to tell him he couldn’t. Nicklas knows this, because he knows Alex. He also knows that if Alex’s mother were here, she would tell him in no uncertain terms to get his feet off the furniture. Nicklas wishes, for a moment, that she _were_ here, just so she could take one look at Alex, raise an eyebrow, and assure them all that Alex was possessed by nothing at all, except a sore knee and a bad sense of humor.

“Nicky,” Alex says. He swings his feet off of the coffee table, and shifts his weight forward, phone forgotten on the couch cushions beside him. “Everything okay?”

“Just,” Nicklas says. He has run out of subtle options. In truth, he probably left subtlety behind back at the store along with Cap’n Crunch. Or possibly he left subtlety behind seven or eight years ago, and has been pretending ever since. “You’re not a demon. Tell me you’re not a demon.”

“Nicky,” Alex says. There’s a whole world of fond reproach just in his name. “You come all the way home just to make sure?”

Nicklas hauls in a harsh breath and wishes, for a minute, that he had something to hand that he could throw.

“Of course I did,” he snaps. “Idiot. Don’t be—of _course_ I did.”

Something soft washes across Alex’s face, and he holds out a hand.

“Nicky,” he says again.

Nicklas could snarl, or find something to throw. He could be quiet and mercilessly civil and disappear away upstairs. But Alex’s hand is right there, in front of him, so he takes it and lets himself be pulled down onto the sofa.

There are a few moments of grumpy rearranging. Nicklas is half-convinced they’re both getting pointier in their old age, or maybe they’re just better at digging elbows into ribs, after years of practice. In the end, though, he finds himself leaning against Alex, his feet tucked up to the side, and Alex’s hand on the back of his neck.

“Sorry,” Alex says quietly.

“I left Monday’s dinner in the cereal aisle,” Nicklas says. Alex’s thumb sweeps down to the top of his spine and back up again, warm over bare skin.

“Sorry,” Alex says again. “I felt old, I felt tired. Just a joke.”

“I’m tired too,” Nicklas says, and then: “I didn’t mean—I mean, I should have known better. I _did_ know better. I just came home anyway.”

Alex splays his fingers, tangling them gently in Nicklas’ hair. It’s a familiar gesture. Well-worn. Nicklas leans a little further into Alex’s side and lets the leftover adrenaline—from Alex’s text, from the game, from not getting into a pointless fight with a horde of Canadian teenagers—seep out of him, bit by bit.

The television, Nicklas realizes, is playing a Cake Boss marathon. Nicklas is in love with a man who performs on-ice miracles, and then comes home and sits around with his feet on the coffee table watching a loud man decorate cakes. 

“Either we’ll win or we won’t,” Alex says. Nicklas makes a disgruntled noise, but Alex is scratching gently at his scalp, just above his left ear, so he doesn’t muster any more indignation then that. “No demon either way. Don’t worry so much.”

Nicklas avoids pointing out that he has, at some point in the last decade, signed on to worry about Alex for the rest of their natural lives by saying instead, “Win or we won’t, really,” and feels Alex shrug.

“I’m not happy if we lose,” he says, “but I’ll have you either way. So it’s okay. Eventually.”

Nicklas feels something heavy and warm twist in his chest.

“I must be growing up, hmm?” Alex asks. 

Nicklas rolls his eyes and turns his head to kiss Alex, and also to pinch the thin skin of his wrist.

Alex yelps, and laughs, which introduces far too many teeth to the kissing, but that’s alright, really. His knee’s intact, and he’s not a demon, and he’s attached himself to Nicklas like a limpet, in the metaphorical, lifelong sense and also in the warm-limbed present. There’s time for him to laugh, and to stop laughing, and to pull Nicklas closer and kiss him again. Neither of them are going anywhere.


End file.
